All posts tagged Libya

At a midday news conference federal law enforcement and Treasury authorities, banking regulators and local prosecutors sought to walk a delicate line between describing conduct at HSBC that amounted to a “stunning, stunning failure of oversight and worse” while maintaining that an indictment of the bank would bring too much collateral damage.

Dalene Sanders, according to the Treasury Department, has been working to move money out of bank accounts held in Uganda on behalf of Saadi Gadhafi, who is currently believed to be in Niger after fleeing Libya during the uprising that led to the removal of his father from power.

The ING Bank NV unit moved billions of dollars from the early 1990s until 2007 through the U.S. financial system on behalf of Cuban, Burmese, Sudanese, Libyan and Iranian clients by stripping out data embedded in payment messages that would have identified the illegal nature of the transactions.

The revelation, reported by Dow Jones Newswires, came via a document attached to an international arrest warrant issued by Interpol against Libya’s ex-oil minister Shokri Ghanem alleging he agreed to sell oil without contracts to Sinopec and Petrochina.

An audit, obtained by Global Witness and released on its website, outlines mismanagement to the tune of millions of dollars by the National Oil Co. and the government of Col. Moammar Gadhafi, who was toppled last year.

The measures unfreeze any Libyan government and central bank assets under U.S. jurisdiction, with limited exceptions, the White House said in a statement. The action was taken in coordination with the United Nations Security Council, which on Friday unfroze assets of the central bank, and the Libyan Foreign Bank.

The fund is the first sovereign wealth investment vehicle to be targeted by international sanctions and as governments begin to thaw frozen Libyan assets, the question becomes what’s next for the nearly $56 billion that was invested under the Gadhafi regime.

Banks and other financial institutions holding the billions in frozen assets need to be on even higher alert for money transfers to and from the area, said Tony Wicks, director of AML solutions for NICE Actimize.

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Corruption Currents, The Wall Street Journal’s corruption blog, digs into the ever-present and ever-changing world of corporate corruption. It is a source of news, analysis and commentary for those who earn a living by finding corruption or by avoiding it. Corruption Currents is written by Christopher. M. Matthews and Sam Rubenfeld and edited by Nick Elliott.

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